Robert Leroux

English abstract:
It is well known that Durkheim was a major source of influence in most of Boudon’s writings. But his vision of Durkheim has evolved a lot over the years. In the 1960s until the 1990s, he presented Durkheim as a positivist, fairly close to Auguste Comte, and he considered The Rules of the Sociological Method as a mediating work which announced all of the Durkheim’s thought. In his most recent works, Boudon brings an original perspective that Durkheim was an important theorist of rationality.

Introduction, Translation Notes, and Comments

Ronjon Paul Datta and François Pizarro Noël

This article provides a critical introduction to the first English translation of Durkheim’s Saturday, 2 December 1899, lecture that he entitled ‘Course Outline: On Penal Sanctions’. It was written for the first class of the final year of his course ‘General Physics of Law and Morality’. We provide some context to the lecture, a description of the four-year long course at Bordeaux of which it was a part, offer notes on our translation, and discuss the salience of its content. Of particular note is Durkheim’s sociological reasoning, and the critical impact of antisubjectivism on the development of his special theory of sanctions and conception of morality as part of social reality.

Matthieu Béra

*Full article is in French

English abstract:
Thanks to an original archive, this article aims to characterize Durkheim’s interventions at the Council of Professors in Bordeaux from 1887 to 1902. Frequency, tonality and above all the subjects of interest of his interventions are studied. We are able to see that he paid great attention to the students and their education (i.e. their courses, fees, grants, the problem of the predominance of Latin, proposals for reform of the competitive agrégation in philosophy) but that he was also interested in administrative subjects (modalities of attribution of new courses and new chairs, procedures of the council) and research subjects (subscriptions for the university library, life of the historical and local Annales du Midi). We finally discover that he certainly had administrative ambitions – to become the dean – ended by political circumstances (the Dreyfus Affair).

English abstract:
Despite the ostracism he maintained towards them, Le Play’s social science continuers did not ignore Durkheim’s work and commented on it – even if laconically – in their journals. The LePlayists loyal to the master’s orthodoxy raised the same grievances against Durkheim throughout his academic life. They refused to accept his conception of the social fact as superior and prior to the individual, imposing itself on him with a coercive force. Their criticisms, however, were less virulent after Durkheim’s death, as sociology proved a sustainable science whose project had become irrefutable. With the dissident LePlayists, the view is different. Emerging later, it dealt with the object of sociology and the method advocated by the author of the Règles. From the Tourvillians’ point of view, Durkheim’s sociology does not adopt the best path for social science (investigation by direct observation), and neglects its process of coordination of social facts (the nomenclature developed by Tourville). Consequently, Durkheim’s results are questionable. The debate the Tourvillians wanted to have with Durkheim took place post mortem, thanks to Bouglé and his students from the Centre de documentation sociale, and their engagement, in the 1930s, with Durkheimian sociology and social science.

This journal owes its origins to Philippe Besnard, and his initiative in creating from his base in Paris the internationally circulated Bulletin d’études durkheimiennes, produced by him over many years (1977–1987). In going on to become Durkheim Studies in 1988, it remained an internationally distributed bulletin, but now mainly in English and organized in the USA under the direction of Robert Alun Jones. It migrated once again in 1995, to develop as a bilingual journal, Durkheimian Studies / Études durkheimiennes, organized from Britain under a team headed by Bill Pickering and Willie Watts Miller. With this volume we are honoured to assume the editorship of Durkheimian Studies / Études durkheimiennes and in doing so want to acknowledge the legacy of our predecessors.

Rapports réels et pratiques entre la psychologie et la sociologie

Marcia Consolim

*Full article is in French

English abstract:
This article discusses the relationships between sociology and psychology through the dialogue between Georges Dumas and Marcel Mauss about the expression of emotions during the 1920s. Firstly, the aim is to show the affinities of their engagements concerning the disputes between human sciences and philosophy. Secondly, from an analysis of their trajectories, the aim is to show that the positions taken in the debates are associated with the positions psychologists and sociologists took inside the academic field from 1900 to 1930. Finally, the article aims to show that the dialogue between Mauss and Dumas reveals a process of sociologization of psychology rather than a psychologization of sociology, which has produced criticism from psychologists aiming to regain their lost position and from sociologists from the new generation aiming to overcome Durkheimian sociology.

The Two Hidden Categories of ‘La doctrine d’Émile Durkheim’

Jean-Christophe Marcel

‘La doctrine d’Émile Durkheim’, sheds light on the intellectual connection between Durkheim and Halbwachs. Halbwachs agrees with Durkheim that knowledge consists of a set of classifications whose origin is social, and that evolution moves from totemic classifications to spatial classifications and contemporary conceptual thinking, but without much knowledge of the passage from the second to the third stage of this evolution. Halbwachs sketches, as a complement, an element of response to fill this void, and in doing so, announces his future work. To the categories of thought studied by Durkheim, he adds those of change and of the individual, which he will use in his later works to explain the movement of civilization. In doing so, he proves his involvement in developing the durkheimian program onsociology of knowledge.